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Google the terms "debt collectors" and "harassment" and you'll find a whole lot of purportedly objective news stories that

FTC Inside (Photo credit: Incase.)

contain some version of the following sentence like this one from ABC News in 2011: "Debt collectors generate more complaints to the FTC than any other industry, according to government agency. Last year, there were 144,159 filings against collection companies, the second largest category of complaints to the FTC."

Granted, the bar for objective journalism is pretty low--as in winning the three-foot high jump--for stories like the one quoted above that traffic in adjectives like "thug" in their headlines. What's discomfiting about the whole enterprise, however, is that most mainstream media accounts of consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about debt collectors repeat these statistics like a verbal tic--and do so as if they were the gospel.

The truth is something more complicated and subtle, which these days seems less and less to be the province of respected news sources like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or BusinessWeek, never mind popular content aggregators like The Huffington Post which publishes almost as many salacious stories about debt collectors as it does gratuitous photos of celebrities' breasts.

So what's really going on with all these FTC debt collection complaints that can't be generalized, glossed over, or forced into a single sentence that's repeated over and over and over again like the intro monologue to Law & Order?

Seal of the United States Federal Trade Commission. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

complaint data from January 2012. We received spreadsheets containing 14,266 records. We sliced and analyzed the data in a variety of ways to begin to provide more insight into what makes up the so often quoted, “180,000 debt collection complaints.” Here's one example of what we found.

Consumer complaints come to the FTC in five primary ways: Through the online FTC complaint center, through the FTC call center, via the Better Business Bureau, via PrivacyStar, and via offices of state Attorneys General.

We thought it would be useful to identify how many different third-party collection firms were named in complaints. That's easier said than done. Better Business Bureau complaints are “clean,” in that they feature common spelling of the same name (i.e. all instances of ABC Company are listed as such, vs. A.B.C. Company, just ABC, or ABC Co., etc.). FTC complaints, on the other hand, reflect raw data as entered by the consumer or FTC call center representative. As a result, those line items required manual manipulation in order to provide a useful view. Where we felt the intended target of the complaint was obvious, we consolidated the data under a consistent spelling. If there was a doubt, we left the items separate; there are likely an additional hundred or so complaints that could have been consolidated.

For this analysis we looked at two weeks’ worth of data, from January 1-15, 2012. Within this set there were 4,599 separate Third-Party Debt Collection complaints. We identified 1,833 unique firms as the subject of the complaints, with an average of 2.5 complaints each. There were 1,502 separate companies that received exactly one complaint; 178 companies received two complaints, and so on. As shown in the table below, only a handful of companies received more than three complaints in the period: